Dialects and linguistic identity of Italian speakers in Bozen

Abstract

This paper focuses on the variety of Italian spoken in Bozen (South Tyrol, Italy) by Italian L1 speakers. Due to the peculiar multilingual situation of South Tyrol, Italian speakers are concentrated in the big towns of this area (e.g. Bozen), whereas the majority of Tyrolean people speak German or German dialects. Leaving apart the interaction problems between the two speaking groups, this work focuses on Italian community settled in Bozen by emphasizing the composition of their linguistic repertoire, and the differences among the districts of the town, also in terms of linguistic identity.

For this purpose, the few data actually at disposal on this linguistic variety will be analyzed, in order to highlight the presence and use of Italo-Romance dialects by Italian speakers. A field work on this variety has never been carried on before, thus all previous statements were based only on aprioristic assumption (i.e. they were not data-driven). Without data of sort, scholars assumed the absence of spoken Romance dialects in the variety of Italian spoken in Bozen, basing on the belief that Italian speakers were not originally settled in this town.

Arguing against those previous assumptions, this paper will show how dialects constitute a central part of Italian linguistic identity in the multilingual setting of South Tyrol, as it emerges from a collection of expressions collected in the so-called “Slang of Bozen”, and from speakers’ linguistic perceptions recorded during face-to-face interviews. The results of this study point out that a large number of dialects are used inside the family, and sometimes also for informal communication, whereas some words and expressions are more largely used as part of a we-code characteristic of the Italians of Bozen.